Unreliable Things
by Bil
Summary: John!Whumping, Sheppard/Weir friendship. He dreams of a city that whispers to him in the night and of a woman with dark hair and clear eyes who believed in him when he didn't believe in himself. Atlantis weeps in his dreams and Elizabeth smiles at him. S1
1. A Man With A Sword

**Unreliable Things  
**by Bil!

T – JS, EW – Angst

Summary: Sheppard!Whumping, Sheppard/Weir friendship. He dreams of a city that whispers to him in the night and of a woman with dark hair and clear eyes who believed in him when he didn't believe in himself. Atlantis weeps in his dreams and Elizabeth smiles at him.

Season: 1.

Spoilers: One minor one for _The Eye_.

Disclaimer: Not mine. Which is probably fairly obvious.

A/N: Rating is for non-graphic torture and passing mention of rape. This was supposed to be a one-shot, but it grew...

* * *

**Unreliable Things – A Man With A Sword**

by Bil!

Part 1 of 3

* * *

_The things that claw and the things that gore  
__Are unreliable things;  
__And so is a man with a sword in his hand,  
__And rivers, and women, and kings._

- _Kings_ from the _Panchatantra_, translated by Arthur W. Ryder

* * *

John hears a city weeping in his dreams. Once, when he was an unbroken man in a bright city of alien technology, the sound came to him in the night when he was half awake so that he was never quite sure that the grief he felt was truly from another and not merely his own guilt and fear pressing down upon him.

But now he is not of the city any more and he no longer hears the sobs when he wakes in the middle of the night. They come to him only in his dreams, dreams of smiling faces and bright lights and the great blue whirlpool. And the city, weeping quietly in lonely sorrow.

He wakes, often, with damp cheeks.

This place is not a kind place. It is a place of bleak cells and angry guards and quiet, subtle tortures that are worse than the loud, violent ones. It's dark here, dark and grey and cold, and there is little light and no joy.

He remembers this place from another world, another galaxy, but there it was a part of his soul. Once he dwelt here in his mind, half dead while his body went on breathing, but someone gave him her hand and lifted him up into a brighter, better place. But that was long ago, before this place, and here there is no one who can lift him up and bring him back to what he was.

His cellmate has purple eyes, and for all she looks human he knows she isn't quite. All the prisoners here have cellmates – everyone is given a friend, someone to care for, someone to want to protect. It makes it easier for them to break you. He will not break. There's little left to him here, a few tattered shreds of the being he once was, but he still has that: He will not break. He and she watch each other's bodies being broken but neither of them will surrender.

He is Major here, his name and his entire being, for he answers to it but it tells them nothing, it means nothing to them. Her name is Markus. He remembers laughing (he hasn't laughed in a long time now) when she told him and saying, "Where I come from that's a guy's name."

"And where I come from majeer is a small biting insect," she tells him and they discuss for a while the vagaries of language.

When they first meet, when he is first thrown into her cell, she says, "I will not touch you." It takes him a while to work out that this is her planet's idiom for sex, like he would say 'I won't sleep with you'. It is one of the ways that prisoners bind themselves to each other here, for comfort at first but ultimately to their own destruction. Instead he and Markus find their comfort in keeping their distance and speaking to each other in quiet voices that are unnaturally calm amid the yells and shrieks of the prison cells.

* * *

He was captured on a mission; how long ago he has no way of knowing, for there is little difference between a week and eternity in this place. He tried to keep track of the days at first, but it was a fruitless effort. Now he just tries to exist until the next moment.

His captors are slave-traders, who swept out of the sky, snatched him up, and bore him away. He had no chance to fight, no time to warn his team. He thinks (hopes, prays) he was the only one of his team taken, though; the only one stupid enough to stroll around the edge of the village to where the slavers were waiting.

But he wasn't sold as were the others he was first herded in with. Instead of making him a slave (or the Wraith-bait that has let them be left alone so long) they decided somehow that he was more use as a subject for interrogation. Maybe it was because of his strange weapons, or perhaps it was the fact that he managed to kill half a dozen armed guards with a concealed knife and his bare hands. Whatever the reason, they've decided that he has valuable information they should pry out of him; that's why he's here in this place, locked up instead of shackled.

They're right, but he's never let them know that.

Naturally, they torture him. Sometimes he wonders if they even care about the information they're trying to extract from him; certainly they don't know what questions to ask, they don't know what information he can give them. John thinks it would be easier if they hated him, if they _cared_ that they were doing terrible things to him.

Instead he is a specimen on which they may test their inventiveness and their cruelty. It's a job to them: they break him into a sobbing heap and then they go home to their happy families. It's hard to resist an enemy who has no interest in you. He isn't sure that most of them are even aware he has a name.

* * *

He cares about Markus more than he should in this place where emotions are nothing more than weaknesses to be used against him. They share their strength and determination and they watch each other's bodies be broken over and over again without giving in. He and she are both determined not to crumble, but John is no fool. He knows that sooner or later they will break.

Markus knows it too, but she doesn't let it touch her. The future will come of its own accord, she tells him. _Now_ is all we can change.

So they hold on for just one more day, one more session, one more moment. Focus on the now and _this_ time don't break. Every new time is _this_ time.

He tells her stories in their dark, grim cell, stories of the people he knew, the places he's been. Little stories, just a joke someone told, a funny situation he found himself in, or a struggle he and his friends won. He gives no real names and he tells her nothing about the city or his home planet. He has no way of knowing who might be listening, and some of the prisoners here are not prisoners at all. He knows that Markus might be one of them.

He doesn't much care.

Other than the stories, he doesn't think too much about the life that's no longer his, for what he remembers he can be forced to tell. He remembers that they exist; the young man with eager, unclouded innocence and the alien woman with the strength to put her faith in him and the safety of her people in the hands of strangers. The older man with the odd accent and the kind, healer's hands; another man with an ego and an irascible personality who might just grow up to be a decent person.

He remembers they exist, but he's no longer sure who they are.

Markus likes to hear of them. In return she tells him about her husband and brother, shot down at her side when the slavers attacked; she doesn't talk about their deaths, only their lives. John likes them, these ghosts who watch over their cell with the shades of his half-remembered friends until it's hard to remember that the two groups never met.

He never tells Markus, though, about the woman who gave him a second chance he didn't deserve. He doesn't tell her about the city. Even to himself he scarcely admits their existence. But he dreams.

He dreams of a city that whispers to him in the dark of the night and of a woman with dark hair and clear eyes who believed in him when he didn't believe in himself. Atlantis weeps in his dreams and Elizabeth smiles at him.

* * *

Markus is strong. She wears her scars without shame and finds no embarrassment in weakness. John admires her for that and wishes he could be so brave. There is no strength left to him here, he's merely clinging to an old ideal and a song of tears and trust that weaves through his dreams. He has told so many lies he hardly knows what is the truth any more and somehow he can hide behind a fiction that he's well and whole. It is a poor fiction, but his captors believe it.

Even Markus half believes it.

Once, he asked her why she was here in this hateful place, wondering what secrets they could be trying to pull from her. "Because I am a coward," she said with simple honestly and he looked at her in silence and felt that he had never known anyone who was less of a coward.

He knows all about cowards, you see.

Markus isn't a coward. She's a hope in the darkness, holding on when all other hope is lost. She gives him hope. She believes in him.

In an unguarded moment, he tells her that she reminds him of Elizabeth.

She looks at him with those strange purple eyes that are the only indication of her inhuman origins. "Who?"

For a moment he hesitates, closing down and unwilling to reveal any more, then says, "He was my friend," back to half truths again. There is only one Elizabeth in this whole galaxy; no one here will know that the name is feminine.

He never tells Markus full truths.

He certainly never mentions the weeping city.

John wishes now that he'd sought the source of the weeping. Now that he knows it wasn't merely a dream phantom – and he thinks that maybe he could have helped the voice that grieves in the dark. It's important to help people. He's lost so many pieces of himself to the pain and the wretchedness of this place, but he still knows that. Sometimes – sometimes he wonders if Elizabeth wasn't right about him.

Markus grieves too in the dark times, for her husband and brother. John sits opposite her on the floor of their metallic cell and he leans his feet against hers and he lets her sob while the memory of his city's grief echoes in his skull. She doesn't want more from him than that quiet presence and he isn't sure he wants to give more. This slim contact is enough for her and if he held her he might find himself seeing a different face in front of him and three people's grief might overpower him. For he grieves for three: the city first, then Markus, and at the back, doleful and quiet, himself.

In Antarctica this wouldn't have mattered. In Antarctica he had frozen his heart in the great vastnesses of ice and rock and snow and let himself believe that there was nothing left to care about. That all he had left was his flying and a dead-end career. But someone decided to grant him a second chance and he found that there was more to him than cold, that there was somehow something in him that was worth saving. That he wasn't just a coward.

For he _was_ a coward. He'd thought he wasn't once, he'd been proud of his strength and his bravery, but war had tried him and broken him and as punishment he'd gone out and defied orders and saved men who weren't cowards – and then he had found a worse thing in the eyes of his judges, steel-eyed generals with no sympathy for the coward he knew himself to be.

Once, in his bravery, he would have defied them, he would have broken with them and found himself a new life in the civilian world in defiance, in pride, in a whole-hearted courage that could flout them with impunity and not care for their sneers and disapproval. But that was in the past and he had found that he was a coward and so he gave in to them and let them send him to the ice land of Antarctica.

But a woman with intelligent eyes had looked at him and seen more than simply a gene and an attitude problem and he had found himself in a new place. A city which lulled him to sleep with its tears.

There he found friends, allies, family. He pushed himself to be the best because he knew that he wasn't but she believed that he was. He learned that the best bravery is born from fear.

Markus relies on him here as another woman did there. Relies on him to be better than he is, stronger than he is.

For them, John can do what he can't do for himself.

* * *

There is an extra way that their captors can torture a woman. They force him to watch and what he sees is blurred though tears. He hates them.

When she realises that she's pregnant, Markus looks across the cell at him and says, "Kill me."

He isn't sure how she knows he can kill with his bare hands and he isn't sure he can do it here, not to her.

"What do you think they can do to us with a baby?" she asks, her purple eyes firm and steady. "I do not think I can watch them torture a child." She rests her hands on her unnaturally curved belly and smiles at him. "I am not that strong."

Neither is he. John kneels before her and puts his hands around her starvation-thin neck, looking down into her eyes.

She smiles at him, her face lifted up towards his. "I have loved you, Major. You are my brother."

He loves her too. That's why he kills her.

They punish him when they come and find her with her broken neck. Pain and pain and pain, until he is screaming out the information they aren't asking for as if it will save him. But he has spent too long spinning lies in their torture chambers and they no longer know when he tells them the truth. Even he barely remembers the true names of those who were his friends. All he remembers is the weeping city and a woman with shielded eyes.

He whispers as his body breaks. "E-liz-a-beth."

The city weeps.

* * *

How long? An eternity, written in pain and despair. Markus joins the ghosts and shades in his cell, holding a baby in her arms. John drifts, barely connected any longer to the real world, to his body.

He should give in, give up, surrender – but two women believe in him and he doesn't quite know how to stop fighting for them any more. He doesn't know how to _stop_.

Light. Light instead of the grey dark. A silhouette stands outside his cell, not a guard. He doesn't – understand.

A gun is in his hands, its familiar weight bringing back the forgotten memory of how to kill. He hates them. He leaves his cell, leaves behind the almost physical hole of Markus's loss, and he _hates_ them. He hates them so fiercely that his rescuers have to pry the gun from his fingers before he will stop shooting the dead, before he will stop hitting them over and over again for all the fear and pain and deep dark sorrow.

He hates them.

* * *

John wakes in a place that should be familiar and he doesn't understand what it is has happened.

"Easy, lad, you're safe now. It's all right, Major," says one of the voices he never expected to hear again and he almost shudders against the strange softness of an infirmary bed.

"It's not all right," he wants to say. It's not all right. Markus is dead and he is broken and he doesn't quite remember what it is he should remember.

It's not all right. He doesn't know if it ever can be.

The sound of a city weeping follows him down as he stumbles into sleep.

* * *

End Part 1.

* * *

A/N: Since I can't seem to work this information into the story, I just want to point out that John isn't a coward, he just _thinks_ he is. In fact, he got a case of undiagnosed Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome so he was blaming himself for something he can't actually help.


	2. The Missing

**Unreliable Things – The Missing  
**by Bil!

Part 2 of 3

* * *

_For only blood can wipe out blood,  
__And only tears can heal.  
_- Oscar Wilde, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol"

* * *

There are some things that can't be undone, some wounds that don't heal. John lies in the infirmary in Atlantis, his body a little healed and his mind not at all. He is – lost. This isn't his cell: there is no hole here where Marcus should be, there aren't any guards; this isn't his cell but it almost might as well be.

His team, those half-remembered phantoms he forced himself to forget so that he couldn't betray them, they take turns to sit with him. They tell him stories or news or talk to him about their latest discoveries while he lies in the uncomfortably soft bed with his eyes closed and wonders when the nightmare stops. If the story doesn't end with his rescue, will he ever be more than broken?

Dimly he appreciates the effort his friends are making, but he can't find it in him to respond. He isn't here yet, he isn't safe yet – he's still back in the cell with the ghosts. Markus is dead and he is broken and the story isn't over yet.

His teammates sit with him and his sleep is fitful because their phantoms circled his cell and when he sleeps to the sound of their voices he thinks he's back there and wakes in terror, expecting to find his rescue was all a dream. Expecting to find Markus watching him, expecting to see the ghosts of Markus's husband and brother there too. And in the moment between waking and sleep he hears the sound of the city weeping.

But then Elizabeth comes – then he can sleep, because she didn't haunt him as the others did and when he feels her presence he knows it's safe to sleep.

She sits with him in the evenings, curled up in the chair beside his bed as she works on reports, reading the interesting parts out to him or posing him questions. He never answers, but she doesn't seem to mind. For him, it's enough to be here and almost safe. He isn't safe and he doesn't think he ever will be again, but she keeps him from toppling over the edge. With Elizabeth watching over him, with the quiet rustling of papers and the whisper of her voice, even Atlantis's sobs are quieter.

John grows stronger (physically, only physically) as the doctor (Beckett; he must remember names: Carson) puts him back together with gentle hands. The scientist (Rodney, McKay, Rodney) tries to interest him in little pieces of technology but John only remembers technology to hurt and to harm and he shies away. The young man (Ford? Aiden... Ford; he does remember sometimes) brings a pack of cards; John plays, but barely sees his cards. Too much darkness from the cells clings to him, even in this place of light and air.

Her name is Teyla, he has to remember that. He spent so long forcing himself to forget and now he must force himself to remember. She leads his stumbling steps through the aching long corridors of his weeping city so that he can see the sea, the water stretching out to the vast horizon. This place could never be the cells, not with that distance around it. The cells were about small, cramped spaces, not sweeping vistas of waves and sky.

John stares at the ocean for a long time, clutching at the railing. He remembers this – the sea and beaches and... He wishes Markus was here.

"Thank you," he says. He hasn't spoken in some time and his throat is dry and his voice hoarse. She looks away.

What happened to them? Teyla is thin and Carson is quiet and Elizabeth has dark circles under her eyes... John thinks to wonder what they went through while he was gone but he can't bring himself to ask. He can't handle the guilt as well, that he wasn't here for them when they needed him to be.

What did he lose? He is not who he once was.

John thinks, in the quiet night under the sound of Elizabeth's soft breath and the city's weeping, that his captors broke him despite his best efforts. Despite Markus's strength and Elizabeth's faith he has failed.

He is broken and he hasn't the strength to try to put himself back together.

* * *

Carson releases him from the infirmary so that he can recuperate in his room (strange, familiar place, too big and too small and too lonely), but John can't stand the four walls closing in around his solitude. It's too like his empty cell, filled only with the hole where Markus should be, so instead he follows Elizabeth to her office and dozes on her couch while she hold meetings and reads reports and keeps running the city that weeps as he falls asleep.

He hates the nights, alone in the dark, when he can barely remember that he isn't back in his cell. He sleeps fitfully, with the lights on as bright as his city can make them, waiting for morning when he can go to Elizabeth's office and sleep in safety.

Evenings, walking back through the corridors to his loneliness, he listens to the sounds of the city living around him, the controls which obey his thoughts, and he trails his fingers along the walls. Something is missing here. He can feel it, like the gap where Markus used to be, the hole where the missing part of him should fit. Their naquadah generators turn the lights on but there is something here which can't yet breathe.

* * *

He spars with Teyla and sometimes he wins, because he has leant about weaknesses now and because he knows that pain is just another rule to be ignored. He picks up a P-90 and tries firing it only to convulsively empty the clip into the targets because he can't stop seeing his torturers in those human silhouettes. When the gun is empty he hurls it at the nearest target, breaking its head off, and then collapses on the ground because in that moment he's back in his cell and he never ever wants to go back there. He refuses to go near the armoury again.

He eats with his team in the messhall, Rodney protesting at wasting time sitting down to eat when he could be doing some work as well, and forces himself to take each bite. There is no poison in this food, he tells himself, no drugs. No one is using this food to attack him. No one here wants to attack him. Sometimes Elizabeth sits with them and she and Teyla take it in turns to eat from his plate and reassure him that the food is okay and no one's tampered with it. He still has to force himself to swallow.

He doesn't like the messhall: there are too many people there. He doesn't like the others, the ones that aren't his team. Some of them look at him with pity or fear or disgust. Mostly pity. He doesn't like them looking at him, he doesn't like their presence, and he doesn't want to deal with them.

Instead he skitters around them, warding them off with an invisible shield, waiting for one of them to reveal herself to be one of his torturers. Some of them try to help, like the doctor who wants him to talk. She says it'll help him if he talks about what he's been through, but John watches the light bouncing off her blonde hair and remembers the woman with short blonde hair who took great pains to explain exactly how she was about to hurt him.

He doesn't want to talk about it. Talking would only make it worse and it's too bad already.

He wonders... He wonders what Markus named the baby.

* * *

He's brushing his teeth one night, as if everything is normal, as if he _cares_ about tooth decay, and trying not to gag because the toothpaste tastes almost like the acid they made him eat—

A flicker of white in the mirror, like the skirt of a ghost's dream. He spins, dripping foam on the floor, but there's no one there. Another flicker – just in the mirror, not in the room. Eyeing the mirror warily, he hastily rinses his mouth so that he can back out of the room, never taking his eyes from the bland reflection.

The closed door makes him feel safer, the threat in there and not in here with him. He mentally orders the lights even brighter and doesn't sleep at all that night.

How does he know if he's going crazy?

* * *

Elizabeth smiles at him as he enters her office, making no complaint as he makes himself at home on her couch. At no point has she demanded that he explain himself or change his behaviour, and that simple acceptance eases his mind in her presence as no amount of talking could do. In response, the only response he can find to make, he willingly eats the alien apples she has left there in lieu of the breakfast he can never bring himself to eat.

Safe for the moment, he closes his eyes and lets the sound of Elizabeth's breathing chase away the demons as Markus's once did back in a dark and grimy cell. Here there is no need to remember the fearful dark of last night. John sleeps.

Mid-morning he is shaken out of sleep by McKay's boisterous entrance, but Elizabeth is in control and he drifts back again. The weeping of Atlantis crescendos into a keening wail of loss and despair.

"Make him stop crying!"

John wakes up so fast that he nearly knocks himself to the floor. Only as he catches himself does he realise it was he who spoke.

Elizabeth is beside him, her hand reaching out to his shoulder. He clutches at her fingers and tries to stop trembling. "Who?" she asks. "Who is crying?"

"I don't know," he says. "I have to find out."

* * *

Elizabeth has faith in him. One day, if he can find the words, he'll tell her what that means to him.

She gives him back his team to go and explore the city. She even decides to join them, though he doesn't know if it's because she's curious, to silence Rodney's protests at the waste of his precious time, or because John can't stop shaking.

His arm is threaded through hers for support, but he tries not to lean on her too heavily. His other hand traces along the wall, feeling the gap in the city systems, searching for the dead area, the hole that longs to be filled.

"Voodoo," McKay grumbles, but John barely hears, listening through his fingertips, seeking, hunting, searching...

They delve deep into the unexplored heart of Atlantis. McKay's complaints are silenced now because he's too busy cataloguing, looking, muttering. The others look around uncertainly, but John doesn't stop. He's close, he can feel it; he's so close—

_MINE_.

Terrified, he pulls Elizabeth away from the doorway a split second before a forcefield can slice her in two. On the other side his teammates hammer on the forcefield with no effect, mouthing silent shouts that don't reach through the walls. They don't matter: John clings desperately to Elizabeth because she's _alive_ and he'd thought he was too late, he'd thought she was dead, he'd thought he'd failed again.

He can't stop trembling.

But she hugs him back, she's alive. Alive. He didn't kill her too, he didn't.

The tremors wracking his body lessen; almost convinced that she won't die if he lets go, he pulls away. She loops her arm through his in silent comfort and he holds on to the feeling of solid, living warmth. It gives him the strength to risk looking away.

This is the source of the gap, this is where the hole comes from. There's nothing outwardly strange about this room, nothing different to the rest of the city, but he knows it's unique. There's something unseen and unusual about this room, and it isn't the presence of one of the control chairs that allow fine manipulation of the Ancient systems. Something is different here, he knows it is. Here, even awake, he can hear the weeping.

"Can you hear it?" he asks, and he didn't mean for his voice to come out in a whisper. Beyond the forcefield Rodney is frowning into his instruments while Teyla and Ford mouth words at each other like a muted TV. Suddenly he's glad he can't hear them, as if he fears their voices would wake something up.

"Someone crying?" Elizabeth asks quietly and he nods. "No, I don't hear anything."

He steps warily towards the chair, tugging Elizabeth with him, uneasy but unable to stay away. There's something here, something that's needed to fill the gap he can feel throughout the city. Elizabeth follows him without a word, letting his hand slip down her arm so that he can thread his fingers through hers. He needs that contact, needs to know that he's not alone even if she can't hear the weeping.

The chair beckons to him and he sits in it, hesitant and unwilling but driven, needing, to do it. He refuses to let go of Elizabeth's hand, though. If he drops that contact for even a second he might be dragged away from his friends. He's not sure he could stand to lose them a second time.

He leans back.

Even without a ZPM to power it he can feel the soul of the city, the vast potential, the power and the knowledge and the grief. A city which has watched and waited and lost so much.

He's drowning in it, lost in the greatness of a mind he can't comprehend – but there's a voice, a voice calling him out of it, and he grips at Elizabeth's arm with relief and fear and awe, unashamed of the tears on his cheeks because he knows better now than to fear weakness.

"John," she repeats, worried and pleading. "John, are you all right?"

"No," he says. Because he can feel the power, the presence, and he clutches onto her jacket as if she can shield him from what is to come. It slept, grieving in its slumber. Now it is awake.

He stares at the spot in front of the chair, still desperately clinging to Elizabeth like a frightened child, and waits with breathless, terrified anticipation. She follows his gaze – even his teammates outside the forcefield stop their silent movements to wait and watch.

An androgynous figure blinks into existence in front of them, neither male nor female, just there. It flickers through faces, body shapes, skin colours, never holding the same form for more than a few seconds although it's always dressed in the same bland white tunic. Elizabeth's fingers tighten around his and he knows she can see it too.

Its eyes (black, blue, brown, black, green, grey) fix on them, focus on him. Its face becomes female, still constantly changing, and it develops feminine curves. They stare at each other and the changes slow. She decides on eye colour, skin colour, body shape... Her choice is beautiful, with black hair, golden skin, and black, almond-shaped eyes, like a cross between Amaterasu and Cleopatra.

She speaks: "I am here."

No one moves. John's fingers are cramping and he wants to look away but all anyone in the room can do is stare.

Then Elizabeth finally finds her voice. "Who are you?" she asks and it breaks the spell.

The woman looks at her with pity. "Have you forgotten so much?"

It is John who answers, John who whispers, "Atlantis."

* * *

End Part 2


	3. The City in the Sea

**Unreliable Things – The City in the Sea  
**by Bil!

Part 3 of 3

A/N: Thank you very much to those who have sent me encouraging comments; I really appreciate it. I hope the conclusion of the story satisfies you - it certainly isn't where I intended to go when I began this! Sidenote: The mountain bike is an anachronism, but I've chosen to let it stand.

* * *

_Lo! Death has reared himself a throne  
__In a strange city lying alone  
__Far down within the dim West  
__Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best  
__Have gone to their eternal rest  
_- Edgar Allan Poe, "The City in the Sea"

* * *

The city whose tears have haunted his dreams smiles at him. John flinches, shivering against Elizabeth, but doesn't look away. Beyond the forcefield his teammates work in silent desperation; here, Elizabeth supports him without words.

Atlantis smiles. "You have the mark," she says, and for all she looks like a great queen or a goddess, her eagerness is that of a child. "You have woken me." He half expects her to add 'Now can we play?' but she just smiles at him, regal but excited, and he doesn't know what she wants from him.

"How can you be Atlantis?" Elizabeth asks, pulling the woman's attention away from him and giving him a chance to breathe. Her fingers are warm and firm around his and he holds desperately on to the feeling.

Atlantis frowns petulantly. "You do not have the mark," she tells Elizabeth. "You are not even a Maker. How do you come to be here?"

"Who are the Makers?" Elizabeth asks gently, wary and uncertain.

"The ones who made me," Atlantis says in surprise. "How can you not know? They had to leave, so they put me to sleep to wait for them. Where are they? Why are _you_ here?"

"The people who built this city are dead." Elizabeth's voice is soft and sorrowful. "They left this place ten thousand years ago."

"No!" There is fear in her voice, filling her face. Atlantis looks to John, pleading, horrified. "It isn't true. It can _not_ be true."

"It's true," he tells her and doesn't wince at the catch in his voice.

"They have been gone – ten thousand years? But they would never leave me so long. Alida died and I slept, waiting. I knew they would come for me. They always come for me. You have the mark." She points at John, her eyes fierce with fear. "You lie, they sent you to me."

"The people you call the Makers retreated through the Stargate ten thousand years ago and were then wiped out by a plague." Elizabeth's voice is soft but implacable.

Atlantis wavers, anguish and panic on her face. "This isn't how it should be. They were supposed to come for me. I need—" She looks at John, her fear and grief hardening into determination. "You have the mark. You must take Alida's place."

"I don't understand," he says, but even as he says it he's not sure he wants to understand.

"I require the human component. You will become a part of me and together we shall watch over all. That is how it is, that is how it has always been. Every few hundred years on the death they would bring the young people to me, so carefully trained just for me, and I would choose one to be mine. Together we run all. It is an _honour_ that I offer you," she adds sternly when he doesn't speak. "You have the mark, you can help me."

"He isn't trained," Elizabeth says quietly. "Will that affect it?" But Atlantis dismisses her as unimportant and John almost moves to protest because Elizabeth is _not_ unimportant—

"You do not have the mark," Atlantis tells her. "You cannot comprehend." She looks at John and smiles.

He flinches as the chair lights up around him. The mind of the city reaches out to him just as he has so often reached out to control Ancient systems. This isn't like before, when he first sat in the chair, this time they're in his mind instead of hers and it's his own mind he's drowning in...

_When he's four he learns about beauty when his mom begins to teach him math and he first sees the elegance and logic of a page full of numbers._

_When he's six he learns about cruelty when the other kids laugh at him for liking math and call him a mommy's boy._

_When he's twelve his parents give him a mountain bike and he learns about freedom on the trails around home. He learns about speed when he flies down the slopes, his wheels bouncing on the stones, and he learns invulnerability when he only ever gets cuts and bruises._

_When he's sixteen he learns about hate when his mom dies and there's nothing he can do to make the equation "two minus one" equal anything but "one". He turns his back on math for its betrayal._

_When he's eighteen he joins the military. He learns about strength when he can order a high-powered rifle to do his bidding and he learns about pride when he _is_ the best pilot in his squad. He learns about power when the planes and choppers respond to his touch as if to his thoughts._

_When he's thirty-four he goes to war. He learns about suffering in the faces of the fallen; he learns about desperation in the eyes of the locals he can't help. He learns about the antithesis of beauty in the hellhole of mud and pain that is the truth of war. He learns to fear._

_When he is thirty-seven he learns about hope in the intense, uncritical gaze of a woman with every reason to distrust him and no reason to believe in him._

"_Yes_," Atlantis says in exultant satisfaction and John clutches at Elizabeth, closing his eyes against the spinning room and focussing on the real, warm, physical _thereness_ of her arm. He's losing focus, forgetting where he is. How does he know he's not back in his cell dreaming, how does he know this isn't some trick of his captors? Is he holding onto Elizabeth or Markus?

Or is he even back in Antarctica and none of this was ever real, just a fevered hallucination that maybe people could still need him as more than just a chauffeur?

But Elizabeth's arm is solid and real under his and he believes in her even if he's not sure whether he should believe in anything else.

The world stills around him and he looks up to see Atlantis smiling triumphantly. "You have the mark," she says. "You will stop the hurt."

That surprises him into laughing, a short, barking chuckle. When was the last time he laughed? When was the last time he thought of laughing? "I can't even stop my own hurt."

"I will love you." He flinches from the stark, honest emotion in her and Elizabeth tenses. "You are mine and I will care for you and protect you. No one will hurt you again."

As much as he wants to believe it he doesn't know how. No one can stop pain. Dimly he's aware Elizabeth is speaking, but all he can do is stare at Atlantis as she ignores the woman at his side to look at him with a terrifying, certain focus.

"You will come with me," she says, caressing every word, joy in her eyes. "You will live with me."

He tries to think about this. It isn't easy, because his brain feels like it's been pulled apart by someone who didn't bother to put it back together properly. "In the computer?"

"If that is how you would describe it. So cold! You will live longer than you ever dared to hope, you will journey to realms far beyond what you can imagine in that limited body of yours."

He licks his lips uncertainly. Beyond the forcefield Rodney snaps at Teyla and glares at the guts of a panel. "Would I be able to leave?"

"Why would you want to leave?"

"But – my friends."

"You won't need them." Atlantis smiles, sharp, almost savage. "Don't you understand? _I can give you back what they took from you_." Elizabeth's hand tightens around his fingers. "I can make you whole again."

He shakes his head violently, hoping desperately but unwilling to believe and angry at her for making him hope. "Can't do it. Don't you think my friends would have if it was possible?"

"These?" Atlantis gestures at his teammates still trapped behind the forcefield, a sweeping, disdainful motion. "They are not even Makers. What do _they_ know of such things?"

"They tried!" he protests because they're his friends and no one's allowed to scorn them.

"Certainly," she acknowledges patronisingly. "But they failed."

"They—I—"

"Stay with me," she entreats him. "Let me help you."

"But I won't be able to leave?"

This time she answers plainly: "No."

Beside him Elizabeth tenses, but she stays silent and lets him find his own way. "Not ever?"

"You will never want to leave," she says simply. "But what does it matter? I can make you whole. Stay with these and you will be lucky to survive."

"I'm not afraid of dying," he tells her honestly. "I'm afraid of getting left behind again. I don't like being the one that lives."

Atlantis steps forward impulsively, her hand out and her face pleading. "Yes!" she says. "Always they die and I go on. Please—" She hesitates. "If you stay with me I won't be lonely any more."

The gap in the city where a presence should be; the hole in his cell where Markus once was. The piece of his soul he has lost.

He wants to be whole again. He doesn't want to be alone ever again – he wants to take away her loneliness and keep her from grieving.

"What about my friends?"

"You won't need them. Why do you persist? They can do nothing for you." She smiles winningly, like a little child wheedling a treat from a favourite uncle. "You will have me and I will care for you and love you. You will be _whole_ again."

"I want that," he admits, but he can't let himself believe it's possible. He looks at Elizabeth because he wants her to tell him what to do. He wants her to make the choice so that he doesn't have to.

But he sees the pain in her face as she offers him a reassuring smile and steps back, giving the choice up to him. It's his decision and she won't force him to choose how she wishes. Atlantis whispers to him, promising, begging... and Elizabeth watches him with quiet eyes.

She'll let him go if that's what he wants.

Atlantis senses the retreat and pounces. "You'll just give him up?" she demands, triumphant and uncomprehending. "You won't fight for him?" She looks at John as if to say 'And this is what you were arguing for?'

Elizabeth looks them both in the eye and then looks at the floor, not in defeat but in contemplation. "When you love someone," she says quietly, and he isn't sure if her words are meant for him, Atlantis, or even herself. "When you love someone you must let him go." She meets Atlantis's eyes again and smiles as if suddenly released of a burden. "Love is not a cage."

John remembers Markus, broken and down-trodden but never quite defeated.

"Love?" Atlantis demands. "What do you know of love? You who live such short lives and touch in such bland ways. Skin on skin? This is nothing to mind on mind." She turns to John and he shrinks away from the intensity of her gaze. "Come with me. I will love you and make you whole."

"I—" It seems like the whole universe is listening in, waiting for his decision, and he doesn't know how to choose. She can fix him and isn't that worth—

Love is not a cage. That's why he killed Markus.

"No," he says, and something inside him breaks. "I won't do it." He wants to, he wants what she offers – but not in the way she offers.

Atlantis stares at him. Elizabeth comes forward to stand beside him again, no triumph in her face, only relief and a little hope. Only when she takes his hand again does he realise he's shaking once more.

Tearing his eyes from her, he looks to Atlantis. "I can't be what you want."

"I need you," she said plaintively, and he can see her disbelief. She never really believed he'd turn her down; she never really thought he'd do anything but what she wanted. She doesn't understand. Neither does John, but he thinks he might one day.

"My friends need me," he says and as Elizabeth's fingers tighten on his he knows he speaks the truth.

Atlantis sneers, hurt and angry. "Friends! What can they give you? I offer you the world!"

"Thanks," he says quietly, "but I don't need it."

Atlantis, beloved pet of the previous inhabitants of the city, can't understand this. So she turns on Elizabeth instead. "You did this! You tricked him!"

Elizabeth shakes her head.

"He is _mine_," Atlantis snarls.

"No," says Elizabeth.

Atlantis's hands clench into fists as if she's going to throw a tantrum. "He is mine! He bears my mark!" She glares at John and accuses, "You're afraid!"

"Maybe," he says, leaning on Elizabeth and seeing his team still working on the other side of the forcefield.

"And because of this _fear_ you will give up all that I offer you? For fear you will _reject_ me? You fool! I can love you! I can offer you so much more than _she_ can!"

"This isn't about Elizabeth, this is about me."

But it's not just about him now, not for Atlantis. This is about dominance over the upstart little woman, not even a Maker, who dares to defy her will. Perhaps she saw something in his mind that marked Elizabeth as a threat or maybe she's just realising the steel under the diplomat's soft glove. In John's experience, Elizabeth is unthreatening until the moment she's suddenly terrifying.

"I won't let you take him from me!" Atlantis challenges.

"I'm not afraid of you," Elizabeth says. And she isn't, he can hear it in her voice.

"I could _kill_ you," Atlantis says through gritted teeth.

"I know," she says simply. "Should that make me fear you?"

Atlantis doesn't know how to react to that. "I'll kill everyone! Everyone in the city! I _am_ the city!"

"If you had enough power to do that you would have woken up before now," Elizabeth parries. John wonders if she knows it or if she's just making it up. It's true, from the look on Atlantis's face, but he doesn't see how she could have known it.

"He's _mine_!" the city wails and the force of the cry reverberates in his head.

He must have cried out in sympathy because they both turn sharply to look at him – and now he sees fear in Elizabeth's eyes. Not for her, for him.

Atlantis snarls. "You are mine!" she shouts at him. "You are mine and I will love you and you will make all the hurt go away!"

"I can't!" he flings back. "I can't! I don't know how and I can't be what you want me to be."

She narrows her eyes, the avenging goddess. "You are mine."

She runs at him. John instinctively lifts his arm to ward her away, Elizabeth jumps forward to stop her – but she isn't real. She goes through them both and then he's screaming, writhing on the chair until he would fall off if it wasn't for Elizabeth's restraining hands, as Atlantis tears through his mind.

Desperately he tries to fight back, but it was easier to fight off his and Markus's captors than it is to fight someone in his head. He gets flashes of his teammates beating on the forcefield but mostly he's too busy shouting and fighting and thrashing about. Elizabeth is practically sitting on him to keep him from falling and his world is the pain in his head and the fierce grip of her hands around his wrists.

"_Mine_," he can hear Atlantis's voice in his head, trying to make him into whatever it is she wants him to be.

"No!" he gasps. He can feel her loneliness and her grief and her fear but he's too scared to want to help her. He doesn't want to be a part of her, he wants to stay himself. "You're hurting me," he keens, grabbing at Elizabeth to ground himself but talking to Atlantis. "Please!"

Elizabeth is shouting far away but he can't hear what she's saying. Then there are other voices too, overlapping in a harmony of shouts, but they can't drown out Atlantis's voice in his head. "_You will be mine and I will love you and we will be _happy_ together. You'll see. We'll be happy and safe and I won't let anyone hurt you and—_"

"You're hurting me!" he gasps. "Get out of my head, get out of my head!"

"_I will love you_," she says furiously.

"You don't understand love!" he spits and feels her quiver with fury.

"_You need me_!"

"No, no, no..."

"John! John!" Voices he should recognise, voices he should—

"Get out of my head," he moans, pushing helplessly at the overwhelming force that is squashing him down and down and down. He doesn't know how to stop fighting, his friends taught him to fight and he doesn't know how to stop. Elizabeth and Markus taught him to fight – but Markus is dead.

In the moment of weakness he nearly gives in, but he opens his eyes wide against the pain and the fear and through his tears he sees Elizabeth's face, blurry and worried, and he doesn't want her to be worried any more. He's tired of worrying her. "Stop. Hurting. Me!"

Atlantis hesitates. And in that moment of hesitation something snaps, something outside of either of them. John feels her fear, her confusion... and then in the last moment there is something that feels like relief and freedom. Then she is gone.

"Oops," McKay says at a great distance.

John drifts back into his body. Elizabeth and Teyla are practically smothering him like a warm, heavy blanket, startled by his sudden lack of resistance, and Ford and McKay are buried in the guts of the chair, circuits strewn about them. John blinks at them, too tired to think.

Elizabeth and Teyla hastily slide off him and if he'd had any energy left he might have made a comment that probably would have gotten him slapped.

"John?" Elizabeth runs cool fingers over his burning face. "John, are you all right?"

"No," he wheezes honestly. But he's going to be. Half an hour ago he couldn't have said that.

"You will be," she tells him as if she can read his mind, and he remembers faintly a storm of a different kind and those words in his mouth. She smiles, and maybe it's only a pale imitation of the real thing but it's a good smile because it means he's here and alive and safe. "You will be."

"Is it over?" Rodney demands.

"She's gone," John whispers, leaning into Elizabeth's hand because the contact reminds him that what just happened was real. "Atlantis is dead."

"Look, it's not my fault! I was just—and then Ford here—and that—that wasn't supposed to happen!"

"It's good, Rodney," he says, letting Elizabeth and Teyla pull him up into a sitting position. "You set her free."

"Oh. Good." Rodney peers at him to make sure he's not really in trouble. "Who are we talking about?"

John just smiles weakly and lets Elizabeth and Teyla pull him off the chair. "Let's get you to the infirmary," Elizabeth says, as in control as ever – but he can feel the relief thrumming through her as he leans against her, an arm around each woman as they hold him up.

Teyla looks at him worriedly. "Are you sure you are well enough to move?"

His feet are dragging and his neck isn't strong enough to hold his head up, but John hasn't felt this well in a very long time. "I'm good," he says and he means it.

"Is someone going to explain what just happened?" Rodney persists. "Or am I going to be left out of the loop _again_?"

"Later, Rodney," Elizabeth says firmly.

He grumbles. "Fine. Do you want this data core, then? It's never going to work again. Not even for me."

The familiar arrogance makes John smile. Apparently this makes him look completely dopey because Ford eyes him warily. "You sure you're okay, sir?"

He meets Elizabeth's eyes. "I will be." She smiles. "Hey, McKay." He's slurring but doesn't much care. "That data core. Bring it."

"What? Did you hear what I said? Ne-ver go-ing to work a-gain," he says in his talking-to-idiots voice.

"Just bring it, Rodney," Elizabeth orders.

John concentrates on putting one foot in front of the other until they're met in the hall by Beckett and a stretcher. As he's moved on his back, too weary to protest the indignity, Elizabeth walks beside him with one hand on his arm and he wonders if he looks even worse than he feels. The words spinning around between Beckett and his team don't sound too pleased. But then she smiles at him and he thinks that maybe she's just as relieved as he is and as uncertain as to quite what is reality.

But he's alive. He's survived this just as he survived the slavers.

And maybe that's the most important thing his friends ever taught him, something Atlantis could never understand. Not lessons about family and faith and love, but just how to see one little fact he hadn't understood about himself: he wants to live. Really _live_. Everything else just follows on from that.

He falls asleep before they reach the infirmary, Elizabeth's hand warm through his sleeve.

There is no weeping.

* * *

End Part 3

* * *

**Epilogue**

* * *

The story doesn't end there, of course. There are tests and scoldings and explanations, there's a long, slow recovery where he has to rebuild himself back into what he once was. But it's possible now, he can do it now.

He's not broken anymore.

Much much later, long after his admission into the infirmary, after his often-delayed release, John stands alone on a low balcony with the dead data core in his hands. It isn't Atlantis, for Atlantis was as much the city as anything else, but it was a part of her and she is gone now. He leans on the railing, turning the data core over and over in his hands, and remembers her as the heart of a great city who has been freed now from immeasurable years of loneliness and not as the frightened child she was near the end. Because if he'd been like her, if he'd lost himself to the pain and loss and fear, then he'd have wanted to be remembered how he lived, not how he died.

Atlantis is dead but the city she was a part of lives on. That is her memorial.

Markus is dead too, but she has no memorial: Markus is lost in a slave trader's mass grave with her unborn baby. But John will be her memorial because he remembers her and he loves her – and one day he will speak of her to another woman who believes him to be better than he knows he really is. And that will be all the memorial Markus would ask. He will live, he will go on... and he will remember.

He holds the data core out at arm's length, hesitating a moment as the sun dances across the metal. He couldn't help her, but at least Atlantis has been set free. For her there is no more pain. He drops it.

The data core tumbles down to the waiting waves, the last reminder of the being who watched over the city that is now his home. The sea that hid her city for ten thousand years welcomes the small box into its waters, accepting the proof of his failure and his success, easing that hard chunk of grief that claws under his ribcage.

Probably he should give a speech or something, but he's not Elizabeth. He's not good with words. So he just says: "Goodbye."

* * *

Elizabeth waits for his team in the gateroom, ready to see them off on his first mission since his forever-ago capture, and John can see the fear in her eyes. Because this is how they lost him last time – and this time he might never come back. But more than fear, he sees pride and delight and anticipation, because this is what he wants, what he needs. Love, a wise woman told him once, is not a cage.

He nods to her in wordless thanks as his team flank him, protective and supportive – and he is not afraid. The slavers broke him but with his friends he has put himself back together. This is where he should be.

"Major Sheppard," Elizabeth says firmly, "you and your team have a go." She smiles at them. "Come home safely."

John steps into the stargate.

* * *

Fin

Copyright 2008

* * *

_From too much love of living,  
__From hope and fear set free,  
__We thank with brief thanksgiving  
__Whatever gods may be  
__That no life lasts for ever;  
__That dead men rise up never;  
__That even the weariest river  
__Winds somewhere safe to sea.  
_- Algernon Swinburne, "The Garden of Proserpine"


End file.
